Gray Area: Chia Amisola – My computer never asks me how many computers I had before

“Let’s turn our computers into flowers, rains, suns…”
Join us at Gray Area on July 26th for a special evening of ambient performances, led by Gray Area Incubator Artist Chia Amisola. Headlining with their poetic ambient work, My computer never asks me how many computers I had before, Amisola will be joined by invited artists exploring the boundaries of sound, HTML, and live A/V performance.
Amisola’s internet ambient performances splay hundreds of windows across the screen, inhabiting the internet as they read the text on a website, its metadata, desktop icons, the terminal, and then their own browser history. Accompanied by live ambient and samples drawn from fields to abandoned blogs, their performances live between a poetry reading, desktop performance, and durational ambient performance. Intimate as it is inhabited and embodied, they click, scroll, stutter, lag, click, and refresh, bringing us to realize the internet is a place we make, and can fill.
Chia Amisola (b. 2000, Manila) is an internet & ambient artist and designer devoted to the internet’s loss, love, labor, and liberation. Their (web)site-specific practice (websites, tools, performance) posits creation as synonymous with liberation. Activated as ‘internet ambient’, dense / durational / networked desktop readings where hypertext is performance, they touch on the defaults, opacities, and infrastructural intimacies of the internet as an ecology, territory, and atmosphere.
With practice dating back to 2006, including writing & software (such as gamemaking tools as games), digital intimacy (whenwe.love), placemaking & territories (their manifesto, thesoundof.love, on domain naming), religion & ritual (Visita), folk archival (Philippine Internet Archive), teaching & organizing (including pro-bono organizing 100+ events across 7+ years of programming with Developh), artifacts & performances (the performance of the browser, the browser as performance), amongst others.
They are the organizer of Developh, a critical technology institute based in the Philippines they founded in 2016, and the Philippine Internet Archive. Most recently, they’ve curated & programmed working on KAKAKOMPYUTER MO YAN!, an exhibition of Filipino networking cultures. They graduated with a BA in Computing & the Arts with distinction from Yale University in 2022, receiving the Sudler Prize for the creative arts. They currently are a NEW INC Art & Code member, were a Fellow of the Processing Foundation, resident at Gray Area (US), Yale Center for Collaborative Arts & Media, and the Internet Archive’s DWeb Camp. They have spoken internationally at the Grace Hopper Celebration (US), Causal Islands, UX+ (Philippines), Naive Yearly (Denmark) have been internationally exhibited at /rosa (Germany) and Now Play This (UK), performed at CultureHub (NYC), panke.gallery (Germany), and 98B (Philippines), recently published in Runway Journal (AUS),Runway Journal (AUS), The HTML Review, and Rappler and have been featured in El País, Frieze, and The New Yorker.
Get Tickets: https://grayarea.org/…/chia-amisola-my-computer-never…/